Most of the time,
the Prime Minister does an excellent impression of cluelessness, combined with
an ability to believe that dead horses are in fact full of vigour. Like the shopkeeper in the famous Monty
Python sketch, she stubbornly insists that the horse is either sleeping or
temporarily stunned. No matter how many
different people point out with varying degrees of anger that the horse has
indeed gone to meet its maker, she continues to argue that it merely needs the
right encouragement to return to life.
And then, just
occasionally, and apparently by accident, she stumbles upon an obvious truth,
and comes out with an entirely sensible statement. Responding to a question from POLITICO
this week, she said “Just think about
this: If having those EU regulations stopped good trade deals, how come the EU
has done trade deals with countries around the rest of the world?”. It’s a remarkably astute question which goes
to the heart of the ridiculous assertion by the Brexiteers that the EU stands
between the UK and trade with the rest of the world. In fact, the UK benefits from a huge range of
trade deals negotiated by the EU on behalf of all its member states, leveraging
the sheer size of the EU market to obtain more favourable terms than any one
country would obtain acting alone.
This flash of
insight was short-lived however. Having
so easily demolished one of the key arguments of the Brexiteers, instead of
going on to ask the obvious supplementary (‘So why are we doing this?’), she
reverted to flogging the dead horse by repeating the mantra that we can have
both frictionless trade with the EU and opt out of the single market in order
to duplicate the trade deals which the EU is doing anyway. Darkness returned.
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